UPDATE: One hurt in Acton crash

A driver apparently fell or jumped from his pickup truck going 70 mph on the northbound Highway 14 freeway Sunday, officials and a witness said.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department received reports of a single-car crash on the 14 shortly after 11 a.m. just south of Crown Valley Road in Acton, a spokesman said. Reports came in that someone may have been ejected from his vehicle, said Inspector Bernard Peters.

An Acton firefighter who responded to the crash from Station 80 said the driver was in fact ejected from his pickup truck, but apparently not in a collision. The truck and victim were found on opposite sides of the freeway.

One motorist traveling behind the vehicle described a terrifying scene.

“We were in the car behind that one,” said the motorist, who asked not to be identified.

Both vehicles were in the No. 2 lane and both moved into the No. 1, or carpool, lane, the man said.

When the cars changed lanes is when the motorist saw the driver’s door open on the truck in front of him.

“I thought, ‘That’s weird’ and then I thought, ‘It’s somebody who is sick and they’re going to vomit’ or something,” he said.

But the driver apparently fell or jumped from the truck, which crossed the freeway and halted on the right shoulder, the witness and a Fire Department official said.

“I looked in my rear view mirror and I saw a body lying in the carpool lane,” the witness said, describing how he passed both the ejected motorist on the left and the truck driver’s pickup on the right.

“If I hadn’t gotten over (into lane two) I would have run over it,” he said, referring to the body. “It was unbelievable.

“The body was rolling in the carpool lane,” he said.

The Acton firefighter who responded to the crash and who attended to the truck-less motorist said: “He survived. And, he’s lucky.”

The firefighter confirmed that the pickup ended up on the right shoulder with no one inside it. No one else was in the vehicle, he said.

Paramedics arrived at the crash at 11:09 a.m. and took the single patient to Antelope Valley Hospital, Peters said.

A helicopter was dispatched to the crash but later canceled.

The carpool lane of the northbound 14 was closed for at least an hour.